Hannah Moscovitch’s ‘Post-Democracy’ gives us a ‘Succession’-like story of despicable behaviour among the super-rich

Post-Democracy

By Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu. Plays through Dec. 4 at Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave. A filmed version of the production is available online from Nov. 28 to Dec. 28. tarragontheatre.com or 416-531-1827

The live stage premiere of Hannah Moscovitch’s latest play opens with a disorienting flourish. As the audience comes in, the stage is bathed in murky light and there’s a wrinkled blanket or tarp lying over some objects. Everything goes black with a crashing sound and then, bam: clear, hard light comes up on two men in a sharp-edged white room, the older man looking at his phone and the younger man standing uneasily nearby.

The effect is like going into hard close-up on a live human lab experiment and, on opening night, it provoked gasps from the Tarragon Theatre audience. Working with set designer Teresa Przybylski, lighting designer Louise Guinand and sound designer John Gzowski, director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu had our full attention.

What follows is an hour-long dramatization of late-capitalist greed, exploitation and despicable behaviour amongst the super-rich. Bill (Diego Matamoros), the older man, is CEO and chairman of a major corporation; Lee (Jesse LaVercombe) is COO and vice-president. They’re in a top-end hotel lounge in an unnamed South American country where they’re poised to buy a manufacturing subsidiary — dealing with China is just getting too complicated.

With impressive efficiency, Moscovitch introduces conflicts: Bill’s not well and needs to create a succession plan; there’s a scandal brewing back at home about a brand manager’s inappropriate emails; and something happened the night before involving Lee and a local girl in his hotel room.

Bill’s adult daughter Justine (Chantelle Han), the company CFO, locks into the scandal as Lee tries to keep focus on the local deal and PR director Shannon (Rachel Cairns) is caught in the middle as the least powerful of the quartet, though tied to Justine and Lee in complicated ways that are revealed as the play progresses.

Thanks to the massive success of HBO’s “Succession” this scenario is likely to seem familiar, from the question of who’s going to take over the company to the unremitting focus on the morally impaired super-rich to the no-holds-barred language the characters fling at each other.

Tindyebwa Otu and her design team make some strong choices to set this story apart from similar ones told on TV, with limited success after that strong opening. The nonliteral rendering of a symbolically significant painting opens up the playing area and demonstrates how the female characters in particular end up on the outskirts of this story. For me, though, this stylized flourish clashed with the extreme naturalism of the performance style, which the actors, in particular LaVercombe, deliver impressively.

Another concern about the design might come down to budget: to put it as crassly as these characters might, they don’t look rich enough. There needed to be an effortless-yet-expensive polish to the men’s attire that’s not present and it doesn’t make sense that the characters don’t change clothes over the two-day span of the plot.

Moscovitch wrote the play as an indictment of the 1 per cent who hold power in global culture, underlining how mobility and power allow corporations to spread their exploitation across national borders and evade regulation (hence, as I understand it, her title).

I believe it’s on purpose that the most compelling character in the play may be the one who remains unseen: the girl in Lee’s hotel room. The details that Moscovitch includes about the girl’s likely motivation and probable outcomes of her encounter with Lee are upsettingly precise, as are related observations in “What a Young Wife Ought to Know,” her play about birth control in early 20th-century Canada.

I find myself having an argument in my mind with Moscovitch about the pessimism of her ending: whether or not we are to believe Lee’s final assertion about Shannon, the play ends with Shannon and the other female characters deprived of agency even as the two men are back centre stage dismissing them. Could you not leave us with a sliver of hope, Hannah? Perhaps that’s what the female actors visible behind that problematic wall are meant to represent, but they still lack a voice.

It will be interesting to see how this flawed but intense staging of a story familiar from TV fares in its flip to the small screen: the Tarragon is making a filmed version available during and after the live run.